Browsing Tag

Men

Posted on February 21, 2024

The Reproductive Imperative of Folk Horror: Robin Redbreast and Alex Garland’s Men

Dawn Keetley

In an early classic of folk horror, the 1970 BBC Play for Today episode, “Robin Redbreast” (written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart), a middle-class professional woman, Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), whose long-time boyfriend just ended their relationship, moves rather reluctantly to a remote cottage she acquired during the break-up. After discovering that she has mice, Norah sets off to look for a man named Rob (Andrew Bradford), who lives in the woods and can apparently take care of her mouse problem for her. As Norah walks through the woods, the camera isolates her and also marks her enjoyment of the scenery. She is jolted from this enjoyment by the sight of a man who is virtually naked; indeed, she will call him ‘naked’ when she recounts her experience to her housekeeper, Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), later. Norah stares and, when he sees her – when he looks back – she turns and hastens away, unnerved, back to her house.

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Posted on July 22, 2022

Hunky Punks: on Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022)

Guest Post

Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.

– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)

Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies. Read more

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